Bangladesh. Skip the power grid: 140 million people in the dark
Bangladesh's national power grid went down on Tuesday afternoon, plunging 140 million people, or nearly all of them into the country, into darkness, AFP reported.
#UPDATE About 140 million people in Bangladesh were without power on Tuesday afternoon after a grid failure caused widespread blackouts, the government's power utility company said pic.twitter.com/j954v6itQr
– AFP News Agency (@AFP) October 4, 2022
Reuters spoke to officials from the Bangladesh Power Development Board, which said power transmission went off in the eastern part of the country and then tripped power plants nationwide, cutting power to the capital, Dhaka, and others. important metropolitan areas. Shameem Hasan, an official of the Bangladesh Power Development Board, said engineers are investigating "technical problems" in the power system. He said the system restore could take several hours once the issues are resolved. "We are trying to restore the system," Hasan said.
The AFP pointed out that Bangladesh's power grid has been experiencing problems for months:
The prices of energy and other foodstuffs have soared around the world in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February, including in Asia. This has wreaked havoc on Bangladesh's electricity grid in recent months, with utilities struggling to procure enough diesel and gas to meet demand. In this, Europe has a certain responsibility because it is precisely the demand for Liquefied Natural Gas from the Old Continent that has caused energy prices to explode in these Asian countries as well.
The depreciation of the currency and the decrease in foreign exchange reserves prevented Bangladesh from importing sufficient fossil fuels, forcing it to close its diesel plants and leave some gas-fired power plants idle.
Bangladesh is one of the largest clothing exporters in the world after China. The country is also an emerging outsourcing destination for commercial operations, such as call centers. So if you won't find cheap t-shirts at international chains, now you know why.
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The article Bangladesh. Skip the electricity grid: 140 million people in the dark come from ScenariEconomici.it .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/bangladesh-salta-la-rete-elettrica-140-milioni-di-persone-al-buio/ on Tue, 04 Oct 2022 16:54:33 +0000.